M.: Artificial Institutions: A Model of Institutional Reality for Open Multi-Agent Systems

Software agents ’ ability to interact within different open systems, de-signed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the in-teraction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evo-lution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent meta-model of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the per-formance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents ’ actions.